Sunday, September 16, 2018

I’m not sure I can write about this book without giving any spoilers. I mean, I could say this: The Power is a science fiction novel in which, because of unknown side effects of a chemical used during WWII, women develop a new organ in their bodies, a skein under their collarbone that gives them the power of electricity. The novel explores, through the stories of several women and one man, the way this power helps women be physically equal to men in strength, and thus irrevocably alters the power structures of the world. It forced me to look at my own relationships with men, most closely with my husband, in a new light, as well as to wonder how I would be as a person, both within society and within my relationships, were I equally as powerful as men.

Or I could say: this novel is batshit crazy and I loved every second of it.

Or: I listened to half of it on audio, and read the second half because my Overdrive checkout expired before I could finish. I really liked the reader for the audio edition. She did a great job at changing her voice to represent each of the different characters, and her pacing was perfect. But I also think that listening to the audio without also looking at the book lessens the story, because it is interspersed with images representing art from the time of the story, and seeing those pieces adds to the overall experience. I’m actually really glad I “read” it both ways.

Or I could also say: The Cosmopolitan review that says the novel is “The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale” makes me doubt that the reviewer has read any of these books. Yes, I know The Hunger Games and The Handmaid’s Tale are books/movies/TV shows that people recognize right now. They’re cool. But The Power is not a blend of those two stories. Aside from the fact that they are all three about women, and science fiction, and I guess there is a scene in The Power that is similar to a scene in The Handmaid’s Tale wherein women wreak havoc upon men…but, no. Reviewers who compare the reviewed book to what is popular without actually making any connection make me absolutely annoyed. (I almost wrote “infuriated” instead of “annoyed” but, come on. It’s a book review. There are many other things to spend my infuriation upon.)

But what I really want to write about is how the book influenced me, and to do that I have to write about many of the plot points, which would ruin the novel for you. So! If you haven’t read The Power by Naomi Alderman, but you want to, then stop reading right now. Well, stop reading my blog (momentarily), go get a copy of the book, and start reading it!

. . .

OK! I’m writing now with the assumption that you have read the novel, so I can just refer to plot points and characters instead of describing them.

I have always, at my heart’s core, been a feminist. I have been interested in women’s stories for as long as I can remember loving stories; I have found the patriarchal structure of my religion inhibiting since I could just begin to see and understand it. Luckily, my mother also has a feminist streak, and she taught me (and my three other sisters) that our woman-ness should never stop us from doing something, even if society made it harder.

But I married a white Mormon boy who grew up in Idaho, with very conservative parents. With—and I think this is the key, honestly—a mother who was kind and loving and intelligent, but who never stood up against her husband. I remember her telling me once that she had always wanted a down comforter for her bed, but she had never had one because her husband didn’t like them. And that seemed to me one of the saddest things about her life, that her opinions and desires were always second, because that’s the natural order of things, right? The man has the power and the choice the woman has is to accept the way he uses his power or to push back. And where is pushing back going to get you? Divorced.

(That seems critical of my in-laws, and I suppose it is, in a sense. But I also acknowledge that we are all products of our environment, to some extent. So my father-in-law, who was a good man, would likely never realize “huh, I could treat my wife differently” unless someone told him that. And his wife, who was kind and also good, would never tell him because maybe she couldn’t even see it herself.)

It has taken me a long time. Lots of talking, discussing, arguing, yelling, epithets, slammed doors and long, furious, solitary drives just to get the hell away. It has been work. But I think I can say that my husband is a feminist. Of a sort, of course. He understands women’s issues, the way that we are treated as less-than in society, the discrimination, the threat of violence. He can speak the language. But, like Offred realizes in The Handmaid’s Tale, even the good men are easily corrupted. Take away the pressure I am always putting on him and maybe he’d be happy to slide into his father’s role and keep me in his mother’s. In fact, it comes up over and over and over again, still, in the way he talks and thinks. It is ingrained: men have more power in relationships. They often make more money, for example. Their aging bodies are not considered as repulsive and shameful as women’s are, so if there is a divorce, men know they can always find someone else to love them, probably even someone younger and prettier and definitely with bigger, firmer boobs, fewer wrinkles, no elephant skin on their knees. “Women’s work” still is a trope in our society, and even though my husband is actually really good at helping with cleaning the house, I always feel like I should have to thank him for it. (And not in a friendly, thanks-for-helping-me way, but in that uncomfortable-gratitude sort of way, like him vacuuming or unloading the dishwasher is a gift he has deigned to give me, the person who really should be doing it because, you know: woman.)

I continue with this work. I won’t ever not be who I am, a woman who believes I should be treated equally and who will continue pushing her husband to see that. Also, and this is important, trying to teach my sons to see and understand this, too.

But what if, like the women in the novel, I didn’t have to? What if there were equal power, as in the story?

Because the women in this society have a power that makes them physically equal with men (and perhaps even stronger in some ways), they are able to fight back against all of the ways women have been lesser than men. My favorite scene in the book is after Margot has had the test to see if she has the power or not, and she successfully beats the test. In a conference room with the governor and another men, discussing how they will move forward, she realizes she could kill them both.

“That is the profound truth of it…Nothing that either of these men says is really of any great significance, because she could kill them in three moves before they stirred in their comfortably padded chairs…It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.”

The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

And that really is the crux of it, isn’t it? The crux of the power imbalance, whether we’re thinking of physical strength, the threat of divorce, the pay gap. Every women’s issue I can think of comes back to that: the power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

I have been both energized and infuriated while reading this book. (There. That’s the proper place for fury.) Energized because it has made me think: what would happen if we could just, somehow, have equality? But infuriated because the story made me see on deeper levels the way women are still impoverished. And the way that quite often, women themselves enable the poverty. That pat on the head from someone more powerful is a strong source of internal validation, isn’t it? And how, perhaps Naomi Alderman is exactly right: the only way we will ever have equality is if we are first as physically strong as men.

Except, women having power doesn’t lead, in the novel, to equality. It leads to further violence. Violence of a particular feminine sort, violence based on all of the millennia we have endured under men’s power. I want the women in the novel to use their power for good, but I don’t think they do. Maybe Roxy, but only because she loses it. (Roxy losing her skein: I wept at that part. Sorrow and fury.) Don’t we get to learn something from the many years of victimhood? Does society only work if one side is in charge and the other side held under? Are there only patterns that the side in power repeats, no matter who is actually in charge? And aren’t women entitled, a bit, to some revenge?

What really would happen if women ran the world?

Of course, this is not really what feminism is about. Feminism is about equality, not dominance. “Women in charge of the world” is the fear of conservative hearts everywhere, so I really hope many of our elected officials never read this novel or they’d be terrified, their worst fears confirmed. But it is also my worst fear: that if we never can achieve equality, if one side always must have the power, and if power always corrupts, then my faith in women being (I confess) more apt to do good in the world is faulty. And Alderman tells me exactly that, that it is, by the framing structure of the story.

Besides. I don’t have physical power to equal men’s. I don’t know how to change the whole world, like Eve/Allie does.

What I have is what I have to come back to: my relationships with men. Especially my relationship with my husband. And likely he’s baffled by my recent fury, by my proclivity to spark against the smallest provocation. Because deep down, I know that while he listens to me, he tries to understand, he even points out the male/female balance problems he sees in the world, while he is a good man, he still has more power than I do. Than I will ever have. Because he could beat me if he wanted to. (He doesn’t want to, or, he never would choose to, but still. Like Margot knows, he could, and that makes the difference.) Because he makes far more money than I do. Because the thought of divorce is painful for me of course because of the splitting of two lives…but also, if I am honest, because I would crumble away in the reality of whatever woman he chose after me, who would be the opposite of me in all the best ways. Because while I am not afraid of solitude and have grown used to loneliness, the thought of facing a world in which I am alone because I am a used-up, wrinkled, grey-haired woman who of course no one else would want to be with, is utterly terrifying. Is worse than the understanding of my powerlessness.

And because those thoughts are so shameful to me because they illustrate my weaknesses.

But mostly because he does, like all other men, have a wealth. A huge store of ways to inflict pain.

So this novel? This novel made me angry. At my husband, at my sons, at the way the world is. At myself. It made me want, so badly, some kind of power that I don’t have. Something that could level off the possibility for inflicting pain. Or even something that would give me an edge. Just a small one. What would that feel like? To know I could inflict some pain, too, and so to be distanced from the threat of my own pain?

It made me angry. It didn’t give me any answers, but I don’t think it tried to. It just said: what if women controlled the world? Would it be different? Would women still be good? Or is it also true that “goodness” (whatever that really is) can only be found, really, in the side with less power? And what does that say about goodness itself?

In another review, Cory Doctorow says that The Power is “easy to read, hard to put down, difficult to forget.” I think for me, the last point is the truest. I don’t think I will forget this reading experience. I think I will be changed by it. It made me question:

Thursday, August 09, 2018

Every once in a while, when I’m deciding what to read next, I realize that I have gotten stuck in a habit of always reaching for what is newest, what is being talked about, what is influencing thinkers right now. But there are so many great books in the world, written five or eight or twenty years ago, still to be read. (This is why I used to joke with my kids, when they were all still young teenagers, that I needed about, oh…a year in jail. Just to sit on a cot and read until I was finally caught up with everything I want to read. They could bring me books every day! Perfect, yes?) (“Never go to jail” is one of my life mottos, by the way!)

The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper is a book I read about during my work at the library, when I was putting together a new science fiction list. It was published in 1988. Science fiction has always been interesting to me, and I have made many such lists at work—but somehow, I never knew about this novel until now. I think the summary from the Foreword by Adam Roberts sums the story up well:

What separates women’s country from the rest of the world? A wall with a gate in it, of course: the title of the novel alone tells us that. But it’s more than than that. In this richly imagined post-nuclear, women live in walled communities with names such as “Marthatown,” “Tabithatown” and the like. Most men live outside the walls in military camps, and spend their lives training for, and fighting, wars. The flavor of this world is neo-Hellenic: the warriors train and fight like Spartans with spear and shield; technology in the “post-convulsion” cities is, by modern standards, rudimentary. Marthatown has been deliberately modelled upon the prototype of a fifth-century BC Greek polis, right down to the collective performance of tragic drama—Tepper interleaves her chapters with scenes from this latter, a play called “Iphigenia at Ilium,” modelled in part on Euripides’ Trojan Woman.

OK, if you know me at all, you know how much of this summary would grab my attention: post-apocalyptic communities controlled by women? And a thread of classic Greek narrative running through it? I’m not sure there could be a more perfect book for me. It explores so many of my defining issues: motherhood, the work of women, the difference in relationships between mothers and daughters, mothers and sons; how we might solve society’s ills. Feminist thought made into story: these are my favorite novels.

It takes the fear of all feminist-hating men and turns it into a story: what if women ran the world?

Well, what if? Would it be a better or worse world?

In the story, it is as if men are given everything they seem to want. So, fear not, feminist-haters and misunderstanders of the world! If women did control everything, look how great it would be for you. In essence, the story works with men in stereotypes: unfettered access to sex, not much responsibility to babies, the freedom to prepare for and fight in battle. They don’t have to worry about jobs, finding or raising food, making clothing, or anything else that the women do. They only have to protect the women. In this way, women are also presented as stereotypes.

If that was all the story did, however, it would be highly unsatisfying. Instead, it sets up this society, but then shows us how real characters (not stereotypes) move within it. Some characters—both men and women—resist, some fulfill the fullness of the role their society gives them, in all its negatives and positives.

And that underlying thread of narrative about Iphigenia (remember, she was sacrificed by her father Agamemnon after he tricked her with the promise of marriage to Achilles; he needed the winds to change so he could sail his fleet to Troy and start the war to get Helen back) is the perfect one to weave. It serves the same purpose that a black outline does in a tapestry with figures: sets them apart from the background and underlines what is implied but never said.

In case I haven’t made it clear: I loved this novel.

My only problem with it is that since it’s not new and shiny, there’s no one else to talk to about it. So I’ve read reviews and recommended it to my friends (and now I am recommending it whole-heartedly to you, my friendly blog reader!) and I continue to want to discuss it. Its weaknesses (the way it deals with homosexuality would cause quite a stir in today’s society, for example, and I can see many points upon which I might have some delicious arguments over). Its characters. The absolutely unexpected turn the plot took, and how right this turn is to the underlying wisdom of the story.

It is not a feminist utopia, as some reviewers have suggested. It is also not a dystopia. It is a science fiction story in the truest sense: it asks “what if?” and then it answers. It is blunt in its realizations about war, and about how men are deeply entwined with all the wars in history. It explores how technology leaves ripples in time, and how having power changes individuals, and how individual choices change society at large. It asks: what is the true nature of men, and of women? Or is there one at all? What are our weaknesses and our strengths? Can we work together?

However I learned about The Gate to Women’s Country (and I’m not sure I can even pinpoint it), I am glad I discovered it. Like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Mists of Avalon and A Wrinkle in Time (and many, many others) it changed how I think about and perceive the world, as well as my ability to influence some part of it. And I hope someone out there has also read it, and that you’ll tell me what you thought. (Even if you hated it!)

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

In my life, I tend to figure out things by writing about them. I know this doesn’t work for everyone, but for me, writing is a thinking process (as well as a form of therapy sometimes): I start with a concept that is troubling me, and if I write about it enough I can eventually understand how I feel about it. It is much harder for me to do this with spoken words.

One of the concepts that I write about quite a bit in my personal journal is my relationship with my faith. I am a Mormon person, and this relationship shapes quite a bit of my life. I cannot say it is an easy relationship, and sometimes I’m not sure it is a good relationship. But not always, and there are things I love about my faith. It helps me be a better, kinder, more Christ-like person.

I don’t blog about my faith very much, however (even though this is my second religion-based post this week!), because my relationship is so complicated. I think the non-Mormon part of society sees LDS people in two lights: weirdos or saints. I barely have the emotional energy to work out my own issues, let alone explaining how we fall somewhere in between that spectrum (as all faiths do; as all people do).

But I woke up this morning thinking a strange thought: not my church. In the same tone as the hashtag “not my president.” This is because of the Rob Porter issue happening in Washington right now, not because there is yet another example of trump-era squalor, but because Porter is also LDS. It really isn’t the White House I am upset with. Like draws to like; I am no longer surprised by the corruptness driving our nation’s leadership. Of course trump would hire a man who beat his wife, because trump is a man who sees women as objects, not as people; he would likewise be drawn to men who see women in the same light.

No, who I am upset with in this issue is the LDS church. My faith. Because both of Porters’ wives went to their bishops (which is the ecclesiastical leader we are closest with) and asked for help…but neither of them received it. The details of these conversations aren’t shared anywhere that I know of, but as an LDS woman I can surmise what the “advice” was. “Work harder at your marriage.” “Be forgiving.” “Pray more.” Even, I would imagine, “you might be overreacting.”

This, friends, is not help. This is abuse. This is shaming. This is prioritizing appearance—LDS churches are full of happy, perfect families!—over reality. This is saying that keeping a marriage together is more important than safety, calm, kindness, or love.

This is making a golden calf out of marriage.

These sorts of things happen because in the LDS church, the leadership is made up of lay clergy: everyday members who are chosen as leaders. There is wisdom in this practice—sometimes. But there is also the possibility for great folly here. Being called to be the bishop doesn’t impart all of the world’s wisdom. A bishop is still just a man with his usual knowledge. And unless that bishop also happens to be a trained therapist or psychiatrist, he doesn’t have the knowledge or skills to help an abused woman. He can offer to pray for her. He could give her a blessing of comfort. But if his first piece of advice isn’t either “here is a list of therapists who might be able to help” or “what can I do to help you get to a safe place?” then he is perpetuating the abuse.

In my life, I have asked a bishop for help exactly one time. This was when I was a teenager, and my bishop also happened to be the principal of my high school. When I was deep inside my darkest and hardest years, I went to him and asked for advice. His answer? “You used to be a gymnast. Why don’t you join the cheerleading squad? You would be comfortable in those short skirts they wear.” No effort was made to explore why I was behaving the way I was. It was just assumed that I was a bad person, and that could be redeemed by…what? Encouraging the football team to win via flashing them my lovely legs? Those aren’t the words of a loving, religious leader. Those are the words of a man who has no clue how to help someone with mental health issues, and also a man who has no clue as to how damaging words can be.

That conversation was a form of spiritual abuse.

Nor was it, I have learned, an isolated incident.

Abuse isn’t a thing that can be “fixed.” The abuser’s actions aren’t caused by the abused person’s behaviors; they are the responsibility of the abuser, not the abused. Praying for it to end won’t make it end. Working harder to be a “good” wife won’t make it end.

Ending the relationship makes the abuse end.

I’m obviously not a trained psychologist. I’m no more equipped to help a woman who is being abused than my bishop is. Except for the fact that I am a woman. And I have friends who have been physically abused by their husbands. And also because I am not sure I have ever met a man who isn’t capable, in some form or another, of emotional abuse (not even my own husband). Except, the first thing I read this morning was Colby Holderness’s essay in The Washington Post. Even without that photo of her black eye, even with just her words, there is no doubt that Rob Porter is lying when he denies these accusations. The voice she writes with is the voice of a woman who has experienced abuse. You learn those intimate details only one way: by experiencing it.

And when she did experience it, her religious leaders didn’t help her get out.

Leaders of my faith tell us often that they value women. But this sort of story makes me ask: what are we valued for? As living, breathing human beings with purpose, ambition, goals, with the burning desire to live all of this life we’ve been given? Or as wombs?

If it is as wombs, then the church is no better than the president: it sees women as objects (albeit in a different light).

If it is as human beings, it is time for the church to act instead of just offer words. It is time for the church to listen to women and then to help them in functional, productive, healthy ways. I have no doubt that the Mormon church can do this. There are probably instances when it does. But Colby Holderness’s experience is the reality, not the exception.

And I know: I know some of my very closest friends might be cringing at this little post of mine. They might be thinking I am apostate, or I lack faith, or who are you to criticize the church? Who I am is a person with a conscious and a brain that God gave me, and a faith that is centered in Christ who said “do unto others.” I am a woman who believes with every ounce of my being that women matter as much as men. And I will not be quiet. I will not hush my voice or squelch my knowledge. And my knowledge is this:

The church must do a better job. It must stop being afraid to acknowledge the fact that abuse, both emotional and physical, happens. Even in the very “best” of LDS families it happens. Prayer isn’t action; faith without works is dead. When a woman opens up to a religious leader about abuse, that religious leader has a moral obligation to assist rather than to shame. To act, to serve, to do something.

Sometimes I write about my faith in order to figure out how to make sense of it. But I will not twist this into something sensible. It is something wrong. It is a symptom of a deeper problem: the belief that holding the priesthood makes a man into a good man. It doesn’t, just like becoming a bishop doesn’t make a man into a professional capable of helping people with emotional trauma. But it is also easily fixed; bishops and other leaders should receive better training, and a large part of that training should be the skill of listening and then acting.

Friday, January 26, 2018

I have been thinking lately of writing a list. A long list of all the women who have influenced me. My mother, certainly, and my sisters. My daughter. My best friend from high school who I don't see often enough but who knows me. Teachers, both those who taught me and those who taught with me. Gymnastic coaches and ballet instructors. So many librarians, both now and once-upon-a-time. Friends from my childhood and friends from my neighborhood and friends I met online. My nieces; my cousins. My aunts, but long ago. My grandmothers in entirely different ways. My great grandmothers who I never met.

In fact, the list would have many women on it who I never met. Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevenson, Marge Piercy. Tori Amos and Kate Bush and yes: Olivia Newton John. Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt. Poets, musicians, artists, politicians, women in history. Even some imagined women.

High on that list would be Ursula K. Le Guin, whose books and ideas and fierceness have been a part of my thinking since I discovered her via her short story “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” in one of my literature courses at BYU. That child in the dungeon…it still comes to my mind often, reminding me that my life is built, on many invisible ways, on the misery of someone else.

When I was teaching, one of the first things I had my sophomores read was Le Guin’s short story “Texts.” It is a very short story, about a woman who starts seeing words in everything, the foam the waves leave behind on the sand, a piece of manufactured lace. It ends with the haunting refrain “sister, sister, sister, light the light,” which is another bit of Le Guin’s writing that stays with me. As does the first sentence of the story, “Messages came, Johanna thought, usually years too late, or years before one could crack their code or had even learned the language they were in.” It is the same truth from a poem that also shapes me, “We go by going where we have to go.” It is the same thing that life has taught me: you can look back and understand but when you are in the present it’s hard (if not impossible) to decipher meaning. I started my students with this story as an introduction to what my goal was as a teacher: not just learning grammar and how to write well and some things about literature, but how reading—how someone else’s written words in many forms, and we did read many forms—can inform your life with knowledge, compassion, understanding, and little hints at how to go.

A few years ago, for our citywide reading experience, we read A Wizard of Earthsea. And for a few days, I knew that one of the librarians who runs all the programs was working on bringing the author to our library. Ursula K. Le Guin! At my library! Those were some of my hopefullest days. Alas, she didn’t come—I don’t remember if it was just too expensive to bring her, or if she had some other thing planned, but the thought of meeting her! (I am, I confess, still disappointed that didn’t happen.) It’s a little bit like the emotion you see in those old videos of the crowds of girls waiting to catch a glimpse of the Beatles. Except, you know. A bit more librarian-ish.

Why would I get so excited over meeting a writer? I think most people are most excited over meeting someone truly famous, a rock star or a movie star. For me, though, it’s not the level of fame, but the level of impact the person has had on my life.

And le Guin has impacted me.

It’s hard to classify her writing; you could use the “fantasy” label or the “science fiction” one, but it doesn’t exactly fit or follow all the genre expectations. She didn’t follow genre rules or the snobbery of Literary Fiction. Instead, she just wrote. She wrote so well. Her Earthsea series is the only Tolkien-informed fantasy I can stand to read, because while there is something of Gandalf in Ged, the writing is so good, the striving for self-control and retribution as well as understanding and knowledge, that I don’t care. (And if you know me, you know how picky I am about my fantasy.) Her ideas about women, gender, and social influences were astounding to me when I first read them, not because they are entirely revolutionary but because of how skillfully she takes a theoretical idea and turns it into a story and, in doing so, makes the theory into a possibility. She is unequivocally feminist, not in that man-hating way that the media and the uninformed think that feminism displays itself, but in real, practical, living-your-life sorts of ways.

It’s not only her novels and short stories, a few of her poems (the non-rhyming ones) and a whole lot of her essays. It is her perspective on life, a sort of no-bullshit approach to the world’s bullshit. She harbors no fools. She was unafraid to speak her mind on many topics: literature, yes, but also women’s rights, abortion, the book industry. Amazon. One of my favorite pieces she wrote was a critique of Margaret Atwood’s objection to her books being labeled as “science fiction.” I mean…Atwood is possibly my favorite writer, but followed closely by le Guin, so the two of them in the same room (metaphorically)? Magic for me. Possibly because I think Atwood’s protest is actually bullshit. As does le Guin.

Her last novel for adults, Lavinia, is on my top-ten-favorite-novels-of-all-time list. Not only because it does one of my favorite things that novels can do—takes a marginal character mentioned in someone else’s work and turns it into a character with a believable story within the structure of the existing work—but because it is powerful. It tells Lavinia’s story (from Virgil’s The Aenid) in a historical context (le Guin learned Latin before she wrote it, so as to bring more authenticity), imagining the early Italians within the context of their mythologies, bringing to life the society’s morals and ideals. But it is also a story about power, and how women, who rarely have any, try to work within power structures. At its heart it is a story about men and women, not just in the romantic sense but in the real, living struggle of abuse, trust, misunderstanding, affection, social roles and personal roles and the push-and-pull of relationships. There is also an edge of tired frustration in the story: this happened so long ago, and yet so little has changed. “Women are born cynics,” Lavinia understand. “Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.” As we still could. Finally, it is a story about story itself, how it endures, how it shapes both individuals and civilizations.

I’ve read Lavinia three times since it was released, and each time I finish it I think “Oh how I wish she’d write one more novel.” She did say that Lavinia would be her last book. But I kept hoping that she’d surprise us with another one anyway. Alas: that is no longer a possibility. Nor is meeting her or having her sign my books or just telling her thank you in person. Because Ursula K. le Guin passed away this week. There will be no more new books from her.

But that is also the magic and durability of writing. She’s gone but I can still revisit her creations. They will last as long as people last, perhaps. At least far longer than her one human life. I realized when I put this post together that I don’t have my own copies of most of her novels. I think I need to remedy that. I think I’m going to go in search of some cool copies of her works, and reread them. And I am going to reengage with the process of writing—not blogging, but writing, all of it, but especially the submitting, the act of asking to be noticed. I am remembering her words:

I am sick of the silence of women. I want to hear you speaking all the languages, offering your experience as your truth, as human truth, talking about working, about making, about unmaking, about eating, about cooking, about feeding, about taking in seed and giving out life, about killing, about feeling, about thinking; about what women do; about what men do; about war, about peace; about who presses the buttons and what buttons get pressed and whether pressing buttons is in the long run a fit occupation for human beings. There’s a lot of things I want to hear you talk about… We can all talk mother tongue, we can all talk father tongue, and together we can try to hear and speak that language which may be our truest way of being in the world, we who speak for a world that has no words but ours. I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively—they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

That’s what I want—to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you—I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you’re writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a woman’s tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don’t let us sink back into silence. If we don’t tell our truth, who will?

I am not young anymore. I don’t know if I have the power of any volcano. But maybe there is a bit of magma left. Right now, so much of my life is about change. I am coming up against the difference between what I hoped my life would look like when I was here—45 years old, my children no longer small but going out into the world—and what it actually is. I am working on letting go of what I hoped for and embracing what I have. And I am also learning something new and exciting: If it will not be what I wanted, what I hoped for, there is a freedom here in what is. I can choose. I can make it what I want it, shape it how I will. I still have paths to follow and choices to make. I still have a voice. It’s not just le Guin’s death that is sparking me. But she is right: my experience as my truth is something to share, to create from, to let influence more than just my own life. This is why I admire writers the most, and why I get excited about meeting them: because they make things that influence other people. That drop little hints about the way to go. I don’t know of any other higher praise than, at the end of a life, to have someone say “I want to be like you.” And that is what I would have said to her if I had ever met her: “I want to be a person who influences others with words. Like you did.”

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Every once in a while, I log in to my Family Search account and follow my family line down one descendant or another. There are so many resources available there, including personal and family histories that people have typed and submitted, so other relatives can read them. Seeing photos, birth and death certificates, and gravestone portraits and reading stories about my ancestors makes me feel a complicated sort of joy. I look at their faces in grainy photographs, searching for a hint of my own; I savor the few details that are there but I wish desperately for more.

Last week, when I was writing this blog post, I wanted to make sure I had the genealogy correct, so I started clicking around on my family tree. I came across a link to a document I hadn’t ever read, called “The History of Charles Simmons and Mary Elizabeth Hughes,” who were my great-great grandparents. Usually it seems that most of the life histories are about men, and while I do enjoy those stories, too, I am much more interested in reading about my female ancestors. So I was fairly excited to click on the link and learn something of my great-great grandmother, who was my namesake’s mother-in-law. From this combined life sketch, I learned that my great-great grandfather came from an old Southern family which, according to county records, owned slaves. Most of his brothers died in the Civil War. He left Virginia to move west with his wife Mary, but they stopped in Salt Lake City and liked the Mormons enough to join the church and stay in Utah. The document also has a paragraph about the freed slave they brought with them to Utah, who, although he was free, didn’t want to leave them but also refused to live in the house with them.

About Mary Elizabeth Hughes, there are absolutely no details.

This frustrates me to no end.

I came to feminism partly by way of my English degree. (Also by way of my mother, who’s been a feminist for as long as I can remember.) For me, feminism is about equal rights and equal access to freedoms; it is about the right to be able to choose what to do with your life based on what you need and want, not based on stereotypical gender roles. But it is also about women’s stories, both in literature and in history. The woman in the text, if you will.

And so many of those stories are lost.

You discover this so quickly when you start digging in to family history. There are many, many of my female ancestors who are noted only as someone’s wife, without a name, and daughters listed just like that: daughter. Yet most of the sons’ names are noted. Women’s stories—all the way down to their names—are invisible.

I want to know: what did Mary Elizabeth Hughes love about her childhood in Virginia? What experiences did she have during the Civil War? What experiences did she have traveling west? What did she think the first time she saw the mountains? Did she love or hate to cook? What was her favorite season? What were her daily struggles? What did she think about her son Nathan’s choice of a wife (my great-grandma Amy)? Did her Nathan have any similarities to my Nathan?

Unless some previously-unknown document was discovered, I will never know any of those details, about her or about any of my female ancestors.

And, sure: you could argue that if I did know those stories, my life wouldn’t change much. I would still live this life that I have. And I can’t really explain why I want to know these stories so badly—but I do. I can almost feel them, hovering around me, the women whose choices created my life. Like the angels in the Brian Kershisnik painting, except people with real experiences. If I just knew something more about them, something real, something unique—maybe if I knew I could see them in some way.

And this is one of the reasons that scrapbooking is so important to me.

Without a doubt, it’s a craft that can be viewed as kitschy. As something silly and childlike, as colored pencils and cut-out flowers, paint and frippery.

But it is so much more than it seems.

There is a long history (as long as human history, really) of women’s crafts being seen as less-than or secondary. There are artists, and there are female artists. There are writers, and then there are women writers. Poets, but poetesses. So part of feminism is claiming (not even reclaiming, as we haven’t ever been allowed to own) our art forms as being equally as important as men’s. Artists, writers, photographers, sculptors: creative people who happen to also be women are taking the stance that what they create is good not despite their gender, but because it is good.

Scrapbooking can have that same claim.

It is, in fact, a radical form of feminism: women telling their own stories. Women knowing that their stories matter (not only their children’s, not only their husband’s). Women ensuring that their voices—expressed in stories, yes, but also in the products we chose to use, and in the art we make—have a chance at being heard by future generations.

We lived. We breathed. We walked on this earth. Not all of us have extraordinary, history-changing lives. But all of us have been a part of human history. Almost exactly half of it. And the only way our voices, our stories will be remembered is if we tell them.

Tell them, somehow. In a blog or a journal or a blank screen in the word processor of your choice. Say them out loud while you record yourself. Or, yes, even: make a scrapbook. A layout or two or five or an entire album or ten albums. Your stories are important and no one else can tell them.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

The thing that struck me hardest, over and over, as read Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, is the similarity in our responses to a variety of experiences. The book is her exploration of her body, the damage that was done to her that was the spark to her weight gain, a study in why she is overweight and how the weight influences her life. I loved it and I couldn’t stop reading it but I wanted to read it slowly and savor it. As I read I kept bumping into more ideas that made me wish I’d bought my own copy so I could underline and write “me too!” For example, this paragraph:

I start each day with the best of intentions for living a better, healthier life. Every morning, I wake up and have a few minutes where I am free from my body and my failings. During these moments, I think, Today, I will make good choices. I will work out. I will eat small portions. I will take the stairs when possible. . . But then I get out of bed. (pg 158)

I do that too. I promise myself that today will be the day I don’t eat any sugar, that I eat more vegetables, that I won’t sit writing at the computer but move more. And then I get up and I start making mistakes.

That wasn’t the only time my responses felt similar to Gay’s. I also resonated with the idea of dressing in dark colors as a form of self-protection.

The anxiety and frustration and downright sadness felt in dressing rooms.

The deep, abiding shame that I’ve failed to do the things I should’ve done with my body, that I’m not thin enough.

The thing is, though, is that I know I’m not fat.

I should apologize for saying that. I should clarify: I’m not fat, but I’m also not skinny. I don’t have that stereotypical runner’s body, with sculpted muscles and a thigh gap. I have disproportionately thick thighs, so my quads need one size of pants while my waist needs a size smaller. I have broad shoulders so women’s button-up shirts never fit right on me. I have tiny breasts but enormous side boobs. My belly is soft and bulges, my triceps skin is droopy, and my knees are starting to develop that middle-aged sag.

I hover close to the top of the BMI for my height, but I’m not overweight. My body is mostly socially acceptable in that I can wear average-sized clothes, but when you (I) start looking at different parts, their various faults (too big, too small, too droopy) add up to something almost good enough, but not quite, not really.

But the fact that my responses to Gay’s experiences feel so similar also make me feel a little bit shameful. Like I am conscripting her responses, like me finding myself in her experiences came from the same conceit that has created the need for intersectional feminism. Here I am, a woman who can wear off-the-rack clothing, thinking that my self-loathing can be similar to an overweight woman’s.

I haven’t ever struggled to fit into an airplane seat.

I haven’t ever worried about breaking a chair at a restaurant.

I haven’t ever been bruised by furniture.

I haven’t had to experience the things that Gay has experienced because of the size of her body.

But I still feel ashamed of my body.

I had this “me too!” response throughout the entire book. So, despite the rules of intersectional feminism telling me I am doing it wrong, despite being afraid that someone might think I am appropriating Roxane Gay’s feelings, what I am saying right now is I loved this book because it articulated my shame.

And that is why I love books anyway, or at least one of the reasons: because you can find something of yourself in the very best ones, even while you are learning about something other than yourself.

And because no one owns shame: no gender, no race. Fat people and skinny people. Everyone feels shame about something, and what I left Hunger with was the feeling that somehow it is shame we must stop. Not overeating or over-exercising, but shame. I mean: she’s Roxane freaking Gay. She is an amazing writer and thinker. She writes books that become bestsellers not because they appeal to the greatest common denominator but because they are discerning and intelligent and challenging. As a reader, I don’t care if she’s overweight. I wouldn’t care if she were anorexic, either—except I would want to read about those topics as issues, as I did in Hunger. What I care about is how her writing has influenced my life. She’s brought me to understandings I wouldn’t have grasped any other way. If I met her in real life, I would be awe-struck and probably wordless, but I wouldn't think "she's fat." I'd think "she's amazing."

My deepest wish, and the one I have not fulfilled for many reasons, one of which is shame, is to be a successful writer. Roxane Gay has done that—and yet, she still feels damaged, feels less-than, feels invisible in painfully visible ways. She still feels shame (which I can say of her only because she said it of herself). Even while she feels compassion and understanding for herself as well.

So what I left Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body with was, yes, a better understanding of how it feels to be overweight in a world that despises weight gain. I started to understand more clearly how weight is an emotional issue as much as it is a physical one. But I also gained an understanding of shame, of how it is working within my own psyche, how it is holding me back, how it makes it even more complex and complicated to feel happy or successful in our already complex and complicated world.

“When you’re overweight,” Gay writes, “people project assumed narratives onto your body” (pg 120). This is also true when you are not overweight. And it is also true, I am beginning to understand, that sometimes the stories come from within ourselves, that we are all of us walking around assuming other people think something negative about us, while really everyone is wandering around constructing negative narratives about themselves. Feeling awash in shame.